Erik is a baseball fan who has been attending baseball games and snagging baseballs regularly since 2008.

8-20-11 Charlottesville VA

Amy, Olivia and I went to Charlottesville VA over the weekend, as it was my last weekend of my summer vacation. The original plan was for Amy and I to attend the Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds concert and come back early the next morning, but we couldn’t secure a babysitter, so Amy and Olivia stayed in the hotel while I went to the concert. Amy insisted that I go, even though I told her I wanted to sell the tickets if she wasn’t going to be coming.

It was my 50th Dave Matthews show. I have seen the band perform 48 times, and Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds play acoustically twice.

As soon as I arrived in Charlottesville something was missing.
My other half.
It sucks to attend a concert by yourself.

Amy and I had spent a weekend in Charlottesville about 10 months and 30 pounds ago (before I started religiously hitting the gym to bulk up rather than lose weight)
In fact, in the background is the very pavilion that I would be at today.

I arrived about an hour before the gates were to open and listened to the soundcheck and took a picture of a monument that everyone writes on in chalk.
As for the concert, I was on the lawn – at the very front. It was the first time in 50 shows that I ever actually watched a concert from the lawn. I usually like to be down close. However, since this venue was so tiny, there weren’t a lot of tickets available. (The couple in front of me in line paid $580 for two lawn tickets).

This was my view.

I had my Song Bloggie with me, which really underperformed and took a lot of crappy blurry pictures. The best picture was taken on my old Iphone 3G:
As for the concert itself, I would rank it in the bottom 3rd of all of the shows I’ve seen in terms of setlist. I was expecting some surprises, but there were none. It doesn’t help that I attended one of the best Dave and Tim shows of all time at Appalachian State University in Boone NC on 3.29.03.

The highlight of the night was hearing a new song that I’d never heard before, called Sweet. It was the 159th different song I’d seen Dave play live. Here’s a video of that which I filmed:

I also filmed some of the song Crush, which was the first song that Amy and I ever danced to:
Anyhow, the next morning, all three of us went back to Charlottesville, stopping at the spot where Amy and I watched the sunrise back in November
so Olivia could see the Blue Ridge Mountains for the first time.
Once we got to downtown Charlottesville, the place was like a ghost town.
Most of the stores were closed since it was a Sunday, so there wasn’t a lot of activity. We posed at the bar where Dave Matthews got his start and met the musicians that he’d ask to form a band which would become know as the Dave Matthews Band:
And ate at Five Guys restaurant at 11:45 AM (and were the only customers there the entire time):
Then we made our way to the pavilion where the concert took place last night. It was eerily deserted:
So I made my way up on stage with Olivia.
We also stopped to make our marks at the monument:
And then made our way home. Amy had a great idea to stop and get our picture taken at the state welcome signs, but we ended up only stopping at the West Virginia one because I was in a hurry to get home.
That concert will be my only one of the summer. The last time I only attended one Dave concert in a year… 2000.

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